Mumbai under seige

I am native of Mumbai, the city that was attacked by terrorists three days ago. There has been lots of finger pointing about who the terrorists were but I don't give a damn about it. It is the duty of the government of India to prevent and protect it's citizens from any kind of attack from anywhere in the world. Also this time I did not feel a thing about this attack (complete apathy), the reason being Mumbai was attacked in 2006 as well and there has been no outcome about that attack until today. I don't have any hopes from the Indian government about this attack as well. Also the way the whole operation was managed was simply hopeless. There were civilians and news reporters running free at all of the attack sites especially one at the Nariman House, which was housing the Jewish Rabbi and his family.

Worse is the statement made by the vice chief minister of Maharashtra "Such small incidents happen". I doubt he would have said the same if some of his family members would have lost their lives in the attack.

Books to read

I have started reading Byte Wars

Also next books in line that I would love to read are
1) Mythical Man Month
2) Death March
3) Dreaming in Code

Fortunately all of these books are avaliable at the public library and hence I don't have to buy any one of these. Also I still haven't completed "Code Complete 2"

2008 - 2009 ???

Finished reading George Soros's The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means . Hate to say that he has painted a very (convincingly) pessimistic picture of the US economy for the coming years. The book argues that the current crisis has not been caused by the mortgage mess. In fact the subprime mortgage mess has been a trigger for bursting of the credit bubble which had started inflating from the Reagan area. The book explains how difficult and costly will it be to get credit henceforth and this will be really painful for the consumers thereby slowing everything. We basically now need to say good bye to the good old days.

I am hoping for a "change" with the "elected" new administration. However I still can't believe that we have landed in such a situation. It is so much worse for people who are about to retire and who have seen much of their savings being washed away in the past few weeks. I feel really bad since it is no fault of people who had being saving diligently.

I had written in my blog in July about being hit by depression 2.0, I strongly hope I am wrong.

Pu La Utsav

Since past few weeks I have been practising for our Marathi play for Pu La Utsav organized by the Marathi Mandal in RTP. The utsav was celebrated in remembrance of the great Maharashtrian writer Pu La Deshpande.

Our Marathi play was well executed (with people laughing out loud) and all of us together had great fun. Here are some pictures from the show.

Code Complete

Have started reading Code Complete, one of the best programming books I have come across. Really liked Steve Mcconnell's style of explaining things. Really liking this one, I bought another book of his, Rapid Developement . However it will be a while before I get to it.

Also for pleasure I have been reading George Soros's The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means. . An interesting read, has been OK so far, nothing great.